Three thoughts from Germany

in which i return to blogging

It’s been almost three years since I published anything on this blog. Since then, I graduated, got a first job, then a second job, then third and fourth jobs. I am now a professional writer; I write for money, mostly about politics and tech and the city of San Francisco, where I now live. Writing for money is great but narrowing, and I’m reviving this blog because I want a public place to put some of the writing I produce for myself - travelogues, crónicas, book reviews, character sketches, fiction, etc. One of my resolutions for the year is to spend time intentionally improving my prose into shape. I hope that these experiments (some of which I’ll publish here) will serve that end.

Anyway, what follows is a series of vignettes about a recent trip to Germany. Ach ja, falls du es nicht wusstest: Ich lerne gerade Deutsch.

1) Volksverräter Afterwards, we called him Hans. We hadn’t gotten his name, but Hans seemed fitting. We met him on a Tuesday afternoon at the Markthalle in Frankfurt. He was sitting alone, drinking a glass of red wine and eating a chunk of chocolate nougat with a knife and fork. He wore red trousers, a white wool quarter-zip, a black overcoat, and a stiff brown leather cap. We wore puffer jackets and jeans and carried plates of the ravioli we had ordered as a last defense against the greasy schnitzel and mayonnaise-drenched potatoes. We asked, in halting German, if we could sit next to him, and he replied: English? And then added: Please be my guests.

It seemed rude to avoid conversation, though our first question irritated him. He was from Prussia, not Frankfurt. Did we know where Prussia was? He was the descendant of Prussian aristocrats, a Prussian aristocrat himself. That’s why he had told us in that particular way that we could sit next to him. An aristocrat must comport himself properly, even when he wishes otherwise. So he was Prussian, though his family’s coat of arms came from England. He was also German, though not in the sense of a Bürger der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. The Bundesrepublik was an insult to him. He wanted nothing to do with it.

We spoke for about an hour. Hans didn’t believe K was from London and put the following test to her: What industries were Jermyn Street and Savile Row known for? She passed. His son lived in England for years, he said. Hans wanted to spare him the awful Bundesrepublik school system, and so had sent him to Eton College and then to Oxford. The best schools in the world for a gentleman. My son probably speaks more correct English than 95% of English people. He shot a look at K. You must invest as many resources as you can in your children’s educations, he said. You must take a personal interest in your children’s educations. For instance, when his eldest son was nine, Hans took him to the Bahnhofsviertel in Frankfurt to see the degenerates. The tour lasted an hour and a half. He pointed out the people lying around to his son. None of these people were German. They had come to Germany from elsewhere to take advantage of Germany. Hans told his son that this is how he would end up if he did not exercise self-control.

Now, this son had ended up working for the European Union. A disgrace. And yet, the son exercised self-control. In this he did not falter. Still, the EU was unconscionable. Father and son had an argument. Father called son a Volksverräter, a traitor to the race. They hadn’t spoken in three years. And quite rightly so.

The Prussians were a firm and aggressive people. When Hans spoke to his father and grandfather as a child, there was no “du.” There was only “Sie.” Hans obeyed whatever they commanded with a military salute. (Here, he saluted us.) Stimmt, Großvater! Stimmt, Vater! His grandfather spoke six languages fluently - German, Ancient Greek, Latin, English, French, and Polish - and could read ten. Großvater was a nationalist, but he hated Hitler. Of Hitler, Großvater said: Er hat einen Schweinecharakter. But even Hitler had one redeeming quality, Hans said: he believed that a day without a book was a loss.

Speaking of which, there were many books we must read. One of the most important books, which had fallen out of favor due to a rather unfortunate chapter on the Jews, was Über den Umgang mit Menschen, a book on good manners written by 18th century writer Adolph Freiherr Knigge. Hans loudly repeated this name - Knigge - several times. If we couldn’t read this Knigge book, which was probably available only in German, then we should read Cecil Hartley’s Gentlemen’s Book of Etiquette. But Knigge was the best. And if we wanted to understand the German spirit then we should read Peter Watson’s The German Genius. Here was a thousand page book written by an Englishman about the unique genius of the German mind. An incredible book. The English have written no such book about the French or the Russians or even about the English themselves. What does that tell you about the Germans?

The conversation roved like this for a while. Hans spoke about Japan (we must go before they lost the old ways), and Montessori schools (he had sent his younger son, of whom he said nothing else, to one), and Donald Trump (whose violence and vitality came from his German ancestry).

At some point, we had finished our ravioli and our necks were stiff from holding them taut in a position we hoped conveyed interest. Hans was talking about the comet. Hadn’t we heard about the comet? The interstellar comet that was hurtling towards Earth? It would come down and destroy us, just like the comet that had destroyed the dinosaurs. It was coming soon, Hans said, with a smile. There was nothing to do but wait.

2) Alps We had gone for a begrudging jog one morning in Munich, when I was still jet-lagged and half-alive, but in Garmisch-Partenkirchen we began to take pleasure in it. We would go out before sunset, circle through town, and then run along the river under the shadow of what I would later identify as Zugspitze: the tallest mountain in Germany. The air was thin and hard. I was reading The Loser by Thomas Bernhard and had become obsessed by this line: “We must always fill our lungs with a good dose of fresh air, otherwise we won’t go forward, we’ll be paralyzed in our efforts to reach the highest.” We too had to fill our lungs with fresh air, I had decided. It would impel us forward in some abstract sense, but it would also — and this was the part that obsessed me — have some actual salutary effect. This thin and hard air would clean our lungs. It would reach into us and remove all of the pollution accrued from years of city living and occasional cigarettes and freak incidents like that one time I was walking under a bridge at 13th and Otto and came across a homeless man burning stacks of plastic containers in a large saucepan. It would fish out all of the London scum from K’s lungs — all of that soot and dirt from the loathsome Piccadilly Line, where last Christmas a teenage girl in a pink puffer jacket had kicked my new wool coat with her dirt-caked Uggs. This air would make us new.

It was important that we tire ourselves out in the day, by jogging or hiking or driving through the mountains. We should come home with flush cheeks and drink dark beer brewed in local monasteries and eat simple dinners of Alpine cheese and hard-crusted bread and boiled vegetables. When we slept, we should sleep deeply. We should sleep like rivers. En la noche duermo como los ríos, recorriendo algo incesantemente, rompiendo, adelantando algo en la noche natatoria — another line that had obsessed me ever since I discovered Neruda at 18, on a bench in Seville, cheeks flush from a single cañita of Cruzcampo. In fact I had misinterpreted the line, which means to suggest restiveness and striving. In my personal dictionary, to sleep like a river meant to sleep the deepest sleep. A dreamless, soundless, death-like sleep.

3) Quitters The Loser is a 200-page, chapterless monologue narrated by a piano prodigy destroyed by an encounter with a (fictionalized) Glenn Gould. This unnamed prodigy meets Gould at a piano course in Salzburg. Before they have even learned his name, the narrator and his friend Wertheimer hear Gould play the opening of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. They instantly realize that their musical careers are over. Their lives are over. For although they are both virtuosic pianists who under different circumstances could have made successful careers giving concerts around the world, they are not Glenn Gould. They will never be Glenn Gould. Therefore, all that is left for them is to die:

“...I remember it precisely, Wertheimer had entered the first-floor room in the Mozarteum assigned to Horowitz and had heard and seen Glenn, had stood still at the door, incapable of sitting down, had to be invited by Horowitz to sit down, couldn’t sit down as long as Glenn was playing, only when Glenn stopped playing did Wertheimer sit down, he closed his eyes, I can still see it in every detail, I thought, couldn’t utter a word. To put it sentimentally, that was the end, the end of the Wertheimerian virtuoso career. For a decade we study the instrument we have chosen for ourselves and then, after this arduous, more or less depressing decade, we hear a genius play a few bars and are washed up.”

It is impossible to spoil this book, whose function is not to convey a sequence of events but rather a Weltanschauung. So I will tell you that this encounter with Gould leads both the narrator and Wertheimer to destroy their pianos and swear off music forever. Wertheimer eventually kills himself while the narrator retreats to an apartment in Madrid, where he spends all day obsessively writing and rewriting a book - this book - about Glenn Gould. Fin.